Mark Cousins' The History of film: An Odyssey

argh, spoilers. does he need to keep showing the ends of films?

otm. I watched last week's episode and then the next day The Passenger turned up from Netflix. Didn't really spoil it, tbh, but still.

As he is talking about modernisms and new waves i don't think revealing endings is at the top of his mind, and its not as if the endings of Tarkovsky films are understood in any way.

Last night's => much like my film going life, scarily enough...

Just a couple of points: I think he is too to quick to define the cinema of a country and then unthinkingly went into the cinema of a continent (Africa), whereas I would have preferred him to define Senegalese cinema as a thing in itself. Hopefully he'll be more specific as other African film makers emerge.

The end of Nostalghia should have been compared to compositions in glamorous ads -- probably outside his remit but I suspect that's where a lot of it went. Wanted some confirmation.

There was a lack of image matching: Jancso to Tarr, or Farrokhzad to [insert name of Iranian film maker here].

cage said the point of his music -- well, some of it -- was that there was "no best seat"

maybe the point of modernist ("modernist") film is that it doesn't matter if you see the end first: it's not shaped or driven by plot denouement

that said, i was out and missed the entire ep

Its on more4, if you watch that kind of thing.

interviewer: do you believe in a beginning, middle and end?

jean-luc godard: yes but not in that order

have missed the last cpl of these, hoping to catch up, but i am still kind of sulking abt that horrible comparison, mentioned upthread, between ford and kurosawa and their attitude to spectacle (cue vague invocation of 'innovation').

when i first took an evening film studies course, at Birkbeck College in the late 1980s, i was p much alone in having any kind of interest in, or knowledge, of film theory. most of the other ppl on the course - quite a gd cross-section - all wanted much more of a history lesson than they got, so i'm sure that this series will serve as a valuable teaching aid for a long time - which is why, imho, threads like this serve a gd purpose, to interrogate the 'standard work'.

i am so incredibly behind watching this that i think i will have to set aside a weekend to catch up.

though im annoyed at the bit i caught last week or so when he ruined the passenger's ending, which i still havent gotten round to watching.

he ruins the beginning and middle of a lot of stuff too tbf

well yeah. he assumes that of course we have all watched all these/this many films so there is no reason not to talk about endings. but i think after a certain no. of years, revealing endings seems okay to do. if i had read that guardian piece a few months back about spoilers - where they show a pic from the last scene of planet of the apes - without having already seen the first planet of the apes, id prob be a bit pissed off.

you might have fallen to yr knees and shouted about them blowing it up

i'm super behind w/this but part of what's frustrating about the spoiler debate isn't that it's argued or okay or whatever but that it's just usually unnecessary; he showed the *key shot* of ordet while talking about dreyer, and it really added nothing; all he needed to do was show a shot of ordet. you can make a case for not going all out on concealing a twist if it would prohibit you from discussing a film, but it can feel cavalier if you're just galloping through and dropping in endings when you could be using something else as easily.

there has to be a bit of a statute of limitations on spoilers though

the bible? jesus dies! (except not) <-- forgivable
that cock m.kermode telling you the scariest bit of "the ring" in the intro to its first ever showing <-- less so

s/b first ever BBC showing

a lot of intro writers for books, dvds and other critical editions seem incapable of not spoilering like crazy, i'm assuming it's cos description is a cheap way of meeting yr word count tbh.

but the obvious lesson is never look at crit of stuff you don't want "spoiled".

like whenever i get a penguin of something i've not read before, i read the intro last. also whenever i want to watch something made in Hollywood that i've never seen before, i make sure i haven't watched m. cousins wanking on about non-classicalist baubles first.

These films are 50+ years old.

Then again I always read the intros off Penguin paperbacks first.

if you're going to spend all this time interview robert towne, WHY NOT GET HIM TO TURN THE WASHING MACHINE OFF DURING THE INTERVIEW (or you know, slap an even louder musictrack over it so we can't hear him AT ALL: he's not saying anything very interesting)

thought this was a weak ep on the whole -- nice to see so much of charles burnett of course -- but the dialectic of radicals versus "assimilationists" was pretty ropily handled, pseudo-countercultural preening obscuring a much more ambivalent and tangled identity-pol story -- nothing like enough on formal content of films, as opposed to symbolic poses (at least till he was talking to burnett)

the "see the world upside down" trope got old fast (arising out of a very over-extended DO-YOU-SEE section on someone's children's book): haha at his response to hopper's the last movie ("but the stupid critics thought it was a fiasco": THOSE STUPID CRITICS!!), and, wel, obviously hopper was never that well behaved, but in what contentful sense beyond drug intake is he a radical (i've never seen the last movie, so am prepared to be schooled on this)

don't like him saying stuff like "an article in the new yorker said" w/o naming the writer (kael?) -- realised as i watched the clip that i will never love "chinatown", and wonder if i could ever formulate my resistance... (he uses the word "amplitude" AGAIN about polanski...)

there's really an excellent thesis to be written -- maybe it already has been -- about the countercultural response to film, and how incredibly sentimental and old-fashioned it WAS, once you got past its taste for sex and drugs and violence... there could hardly BE a more old-fashioned manipulatively ending film than "the graduate" (YOUTH IS FAB, old people understand nothing especially LOVE or ART)... of course kael was half-writing it at the time, and her aggressive support of directors like altman (and the "assimilationists") hinged on her own sense that the counterculture vanguard WASN'T making film better, it was falling for "far out" spectacle laced with preachy and self-regarding hippyish moralism

(to be fair cousins wasn't repping for petulia or el toro or the strawberry statement this week, those arguments do seem to have been won...)

Was kind of exasperated by this ep, didn't really have the strength to type up anything. Really pissed at the Dennis Hopper bit -- I always thought he was a real waste of time who got a bit lucky w/a few roles and the comeback in Blue Velvet. All a bit MC5 posing with their K-47s.

Apart from Burnett I liked Schrader, especially when he said how he'd like a return to existentialist cinema and then a second later exclaiming it would get old.

There was some gd formal content w/Taxi Driver and Malick, too. What this needed was a story to be told in parallel w/ other 70s films from other scenes and countries. This series has led me to watch quite a bit of experimental film, the best of which comes from Hollis Frampton. Tough, rigorous framing that is also (at its best) witty, the image and the idea often came together with a set of emotions. MAYBE he could've tied that with Chantal Akermann's work -- instead of restricting his geographical boundaries, which was a problem if you talk about narrative cinema of the time he was focusing on, but he needn't have left it as a weak lament.

Last week's one was a 'rest of the world' trip and I don't think this division (he's going backpacking again next week) really works.

oh yes, the peanut shells as locusts! i liked that bit

oh and the thing on "north lighting" in the godfather, i enjoy when he discusses stuff like that

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helke_Sander

w/Akermann I'd say another key film is Sander's The All-Around Reduced Personality (from the late 70s). Love that one, v lucky to catch a screening of it at the Goethe Instiutt a few years ago.

i saw the last movie a looong time ago, when it was revived at the nft in the 1980s - my main memory of it is that the 'opening titles' didn't appear until abt twenty minutes into the film, which i guess was sort've radical. but yes, hopper was in many ways quite an 'inside' figure, someone trained in old school studio system filmmaking under ppl like henry hathaway, who hopper wld later be toughly sentimental abt. hopper, warren beatty and of course bogdanovich all played great hommage to american or american-based filmmakers from 'the golden age' of the studio system - and even someone like john carpenter, much more of an outsider maybe, fantasised about having the same kind of career as howard hawks - or an sentimentalised, idealised version of that kind of career. i guess we all want to be assimilated by 'the thing' (hollywood) at some level or other.

this is all without seeing the episode in question.

9am: thinking of turning the sound off at the intro :-)

pm I mean

oh sod it clashes with x-factor plus i am only a third of the way into my wine

ah, its a toughie, there is always the 1am repeat.

Man I love Fassbinder's scruffy intense face screen

Excellent beginning -- getting back to strenghts in comparing the American cinema that inspired German cinema in the 70s, although I think Fassbinder and Wenders genuinely adored that cinema a lot more than Cousins is letting on.

DAS IST NICHT EIN BAUBLE JETZ

ok i am a bit drunk

but have to watch misha b now

by 1am you will be even more drunk I'm sure -- don't disappoint me when I wake up :-)

And that Von Trotta film, saw that years ago -- so happy he's included that.

The best of:

Italian cinema: Identity and sex
German cinema: Identity and History.

Not sure you can generalise like this

christ I can't stand Ken Russell

PLEASE GOD LET HIM PLAY A CLIP OF "THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM"

The image matching from film to film is among the best I've seen so far. He's brilliant on The Conformist. That Bertolucci related story of his meeting w/Godard meet in a Paris cafe is good. Could have explored some of that with a 30 sec look at Godard's Vertov stuff.

Whenever he speaks the word 'identity' I die a little a little tho'. All bobbins, for real. xp

haha "she's like chas in performance shedding her clean-cut self when she meets a more vital human being" -- ok chas is a GANGSTER and the "more vital human being" was mick jagger MOSTLY IN BED

*sigh* at deploying "the raw and the cooked" to mean "the vital and alive and amazing vs the lame and entombed": MARK COUSINS YOU DO NOT EAT YOUR FOOD RAW you ponce

Weird to talk about that last scene of Walkabout (a scene I've liked in terms of pure film although it didn't make sense to me as Agutter character never shows that much feeling toward the Aboriginal kid).

Also I've been watching Mad Men all day (and for the first time). xp

That scene of Australians in a swimming pool next to the sea is a good find tho'.

SPOILERS she actually causes his death, though not intentionally -- i think the idea is that she is terrified and wants to get home while she's in the desert, but once she IS home and safe she realises she was caught up in something amazing, and relives

the key word in "performance" is the word performance, oddly enough -- and the aboriginal kid is just as caught up in it as jenny agutter (he's "performing" his own puberty ritual, iirc)

ok yeah that reading makes a lot more sense.

These Japanese docs...I just need to see 'em.

i've missed em all by writing too much, i'll have to watch them in the middle of the night (after "the thin red line" HOW WILL I STAY AWAKE?)

Yeah I was only partially watching, but an inspired move to go on about them -- he could've chosen to talk about a million other things going on in Japanese cinema at that time

distractoblogging

STOP SAYING RADICAL you nob

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Cinema

^Not heard of this...